


Remembrance

by DancerInTheShadows



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dead Dean Winchester, Dead Sam Winchester, Future Fic, Gen, Hunter Castiel, Legendary Winchesters, POV Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 20:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12515940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancerInTheShadows/pseuds/DancerInTheShadows
Summary: Castiel remembers the Winchesters, fifty years after their deaths.





	Remembrance

**Author's Note:**

> This one was fun to write.  
> Sort of AU, and rather. . . abstract?

It had been somewhere in the vicinity of fifty years. Maybe more, maybe less, he didn’t really know. He’d slipped out of slowtime after they’d gone, moving not on a pattern of hours and days but on a pattern of months and years. And even that was slow, compared to how he’d seen time before. But he’d spent years on a human perspective, and that sort of thing leaves you changed, leaves you unable to stand by and let the eons pass and give them no more attention than a passing breeze. Maybe time would slowly erode at that perspective, the way it’d done the first time around, but he couldn’t be sure. For all his billions of years of life, he’d never had experiences like this before.

No angel had.

Among the Host, he was a bit of a novelty. After their Father had returned, He’d pardoned him, forgiven him everything, commended him, even, for bravery and daring and other attributes that he really felt he didn’t have. He’d bluffed his way through his time on Earth, just sort of fumbling along and relying on their support to keep him upright that first decade or so.

He’d gotten better at living among the humans. He wasn’t nearly so conspicuous as he’d been before. A hundred-or-so years of being on your own will do that to you.

Primarily on his own. Although his Father had forgiven him, most of the Host was still leery of him, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that he hadn’t been back to Heaven in, what was it… twenty-five years? Something like that.

Heaven was too dull for him now, not after he’d spent years hunting monsters and stopping apocalypses (strange, that word was never meant to be plural. There had only ever been one “true” Apocalypse, but it was the only word that could possibly describe the Leviathans and the Darkness and everything else.) and even causing them. Years of living in the tumultuous human world, with its visible wars and its hidden wars and those conflicts (hopefully over, if Father be willing) that only a few people knew the truth of.

He still kept in contact with others, hunters and others who thought he was an angel taking advantage of the loosened restrictions on coming to Earth to experience some human thrills, people who knew what he was. Not what he’d done, though. They were too famous, and, by extension, he was as well. Even the first syllable of his name, the name they’d called him by, was instantly recognizable to anyone who’d heard the stories. And it was getting rarer that he told someone he was an angel, as well. Angels had mostly left Earth, retreating to Heaven and resuming their place as watchers of humanity. Most hunters didn’t think there were any left on Earth anymore. And some didn’t believe in them at all, casting aside his role in the stories as myth, legend, portraying him as a witch, a psychic, an unusual class of demon, but not an angel.

He’d listened to the stories once, and had barely been able to restrain himself from correcting some of the more glaring errors. (No, he did not cast that idiot archangel out of his body, only to have him move into his half-brother. I forced him to reverse his consent, and his half-brother gave it in his stead!) And when he wasn’t scoffing at their blatant lies, (at least to someone who’d been there) he was trying not to cry at the memories they brought back. He’d stopped listening eventually, because those stories weren’t ones you cried during, not while their great deeds were being passed down as legend to the younger generation of hunters.

If he wanted to remember, he went back. Back to the bunker, the place they’d lived in for seven years. It was oddly impersonal there now, the library empty of all the signs that people had spent time there, the normal clutter of human habitation cleaned away. It had started to look less nostalgic and more messy, so he’d done his best to tidy up. It was beginning to regret that now, but what was done was done and he couldn’t put everything back the way it was, no matter how much he wanted to.

The car was still in the garage. He washed her every time he came here, careful to clean off the dust that accumulated on her gleaming black hide. He hadn’t been able to drive her, she’d be instantly recognizable as being well over a century old. And besides, that was his car. He wasn’t going to drive her without his permission, and that was never going to happen, not since… 

He hadn’t been able to touch the bedrooms yet. Those he’d left as is, with weapons on the walls and clothes in the dressers and beds still unmade, like they’d been expecting to come back after this next apocalypse and laugh about it, joke about it, be thankful that this calamity was over and start preparing for the next one, the one that would inevitably come as long as they were alive.

They hadn’t, though. This had been the one to end them, the one that cut off their long record that would have been, could have been, should have been far longer. It was fitting, though, that they’d go out that way. Saving the world one last time, sacrificing their lives for each other, and the world. Blaze of glory, the only way they really deserved.

He’d tried to give them the best send-off he could, remembering the old hunter custom of burning the bodies. The ancient Vikings had had a similar custom, great warriors and raiders set alight on their boats. Their pyre had been tree-high, out in the middle of nowhere, flames licking at the stars, and he’d stayed there until everything was nothing but ashes and the wind had carried the last traces of the bodies that had gone beyond the edge and come back so many times away.

He’d discarded his old body then, left it lying on his bed in the bunker underneath a stasis spell that kept the lifeless flesh from rotting. He was too recognizable in that body, and he didn’t think he could handle having to deal with the constant comments from others, the awed stares, the whispers, the constant questioning if it was all true.

His old vessel’s daughter had been in her late twenties by that time, and he’d contemplated using her. But he’d returned to Heaven for a time, until she was in her late sixties and sick. He offered to take her as a vessel, and after some pestering she’d agreed.

His new body was older, although that didn’t matter, not to him. Female, blond-haired. He kept up with the hairstyle she’d worn her entire life, braids on the side of her head. She wasn’t recognized, not now after she’d retired. And she’d never been quite as famous, known as a good hunter, but a bit of a recluse.

He kept on with his life, moving around, taking on the more dangerous things that no ordinary hunter could handle. It was his was of saying thank you.

Thank you for everything you did for me.

**Author's Note:**

> What'd you think? Please leave feedback in the comments, thanks!


End file.
